


Running

by renegone



Series: Alexandra Shepard [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Background story, Earthborn (Mass Effect), Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegone/pseuds/renegone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s scared and she’s cold and she wants to keep running but the dry spot under the bench, under the trees, under the stars seems alright for now.</p><p>It’s the only place she’s ever felt safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic I've put up here on AO3, written about my Alexandra Shepard, who is an Earthborn, Ruthless, Renegon, and is also my "canon Shepard". Expect to see more of her around soon.
> 
> Set around the days before she became a street kid and with the Reds, running away from the many orphanage and social care environments she's been placed in and being notorious as the resident "problem child". I hoped to capture a part of her in the brink of a hopeless kid and slowly transitioning into more of the jaded, angry sort of character she becomes. I still have yet to fully flesh out her back story, but this piece in particular helped me map out some of it. Also sort of inspired by all those benches in the nightmare sequences in ME3. 
> 
> I would be appreciative of any sort of comments and of course kudos. Enjoy!

Her tooth comes out when his fist meets her cheek, square on the jaw that she’s sure it will be next to impossible to chew in the coming days—not like there was anything substantial to eat, but she likes having a functional mouth. She can eat, she can bite. Her teeth ache to clamp down on his skin to make him bleed— _payback, payback, payback_ , her mind chants; but it hurts too much and she tastes blood, so she instead spits the mouthful of it onto his face. He sputters and she thinks she can land another punch, but he moves his head to the side and her fist meets the concrete floor. A particular guttural growl escapes from her mouth—with her now-busted knuckles, she feels like she’s losing even if she’s got him straddled on the ground with tears out of his eyes and a split lip. 

She feels like she’s losing and she’s angry. She doesn’t like to lose, not when she can help it.

So she rebuts by scratching his face until he bleeds. The fact that her nails were bitten down to their beds didn’t exactly aid her efforts, but the erratic, ragged way she went about it fueled her. He keeps rolling and squirming under her grip and when she drags her fingers particularly harsh, harsh enough for him to scream, _No, please!_ , a familiar blue tinge starts to appear on her hands; it takes her a beat of a moment to retract and keep herself from sinking her fingers deep into his skin and seeing what they would do. 

The blue lights are tempting to use, creeping up underneath the skin on her fingertips, but she knows she can’t use them. She knows what happened to kids who were like her—they were forked over to some place far; some of them died and some of them lived, then died later on. She heard the horror stories, the whispers about the kids next door, taken away to be experimented with and killed.

Once, in the middle of the night, in the girls’ room of the orphanage, she showed them the blue lights. The little ones looked up in awe and fear but one of the older girls, the one who was always gone and smelled like smoke, came up behind her and started digging her sharp nails into her scalp. _Stop!_ , she had cried; the girl only laughed. The girl said it’s what it would feel like— _a billion times worse_ —if the adults found out. They would cut her head open and put something in there, and that it would hurt until the day she died.

So she doesn’t blast him—frankly, she doesn’t exactly know how—and instead, closes her eyes to refrain from digging into his skin with the warm, blue lights. They always stop whenever she tries to level her head. She resumes her ministrations, clawing at his face, watching him squirm and scream beneath her—he retaliates by pulling on her hair with enough strength to rip brittle strands out. 

All around her is a mess of screams and _Fight, fight, fight!_ —it makes her blood hot, makes her want to use the blue lights. 

By the time they're split up, she has a bloody nose and a bloody mouth and angry bruises festering against her skin—she’s crying too, but between the snot and warm blood running down her face, she couldn’t have been bothered to notice.

It always ends like this. One small catalyst of a word or phrase would rub her off the wrong way and turn out into an all-out fight—this time, he called her ugly because she smelled. In truth, she did, because the goddamn bathroom in the goddamn house was dirty and nobody ever seemed to save hot water or soap for her to use; and she didn’t want to take off her clothes because it was all she had and she didn’t want them taking them from her. She smells like sweat and grime and she knows this, they all do. But the remark bit down hard to her, and she was _mad._

Thundering footsteps greet her ears and at once, she gets up from the floor onto skinny, shaking legs. Defiant brown eyes dare not to look up from the floor, ears ringing with taunts and reprimands. She screams when her arm is yanked and seized with a tight grip, mind both white-hot alert and numb at once. The boy is scrambling to his scrawny limbs on the floor and she’s being shouted at—loud and angry expletives all-too familiar to her ears. She wants to shout back (even if she _knows_ it will earn her a slap across the face), but she can't muster up the energy, so she bites down on the hand that’s grabbed her and makes a run for it. 

Angrily, she tears through the front door, past the crying snot-nosed kid right by the entrance, still sat on the floor after wailing on and on, past the taunts, past the yelling adult who told her to get back here now or else! 

She wants to leave. And she does. 

She runs and runs and runs in her ugly, torn up shoes that have holes where her toes go and sop up all wet when it rains; she runs even though it aggravates the barely-healed scabs on her knees and tears them open into new wounds; she runs even when she’s heaving ugly, constricted breaths and she feels like she’s sucking in icy air; she runs because she’s never known anything but. 

Dodging cars, ducking her head, ignoring strangers calling out to her; she runs twice as fast when she hears a wolf whistle not too far behind her, and double that when they’re calling out to her and following. Her nimble legs maneuver her through the streets, turning sharp corners and having no care where she’s going. All she knows is she wants to go far, far away. Far from the dirty men that grab kids like her and make them disappear, only to come stumbling back days later with dark circles under their eyes and spent looking bodies. She doesn’t want to be one of them. 

She runs until her legs give way and she thinks she’s far enough from the voices and the sound of smashing beer bottles. 

Far enough from the smell of smoke and smog and sewer.

It’s getting dark and she doesn’t want to go back. 

It’s getting dark and it starts to rain.

She spots an empty bench in an empty park, and it looks like the very best place to be grabbed or shot, but she looks one more time and it seems safe enough.  


She’s scared and she’s cold and she wants to keep running but the dry spot under the bench, under the trees, under the stars seems alright for now.

It’s the only place she’s ever felt safe.

Dirt meets the small of her back when she lies down, shirt too small. It’s cold and somehow, a lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach tells her to go back to the crowded, hot community home because her toes are cold and her fingers are shaking and her lungs feel like they’re on fire. But she doesn’t get up, almost as if she’s rooted to the spot—she smells dirt and grass and herself and nobody can see her. She doesn’t want anyone to. 

She breathes in, and through the cracks in the wood of the bench, she sees past the tree branches and up onto the sky. It’s hard to make up all the twinkling lights because of the pollution and smog but she could see a few, like someone poked holes in the night sky and out spilled light. 

She wonders why they’re there and what they’re for. 

She wonders if she could go up there. 

She knows she probably can’t. Not without a reason, not without credits. 

Despite herself, she pictures herself walking on the stars and looking down on Earth but never going back; she _hates_ Earth and everything in it. She doesn’t know much about what’s up there but she knows there’s something—other things, other worlds, other people. She finds herself unable to think too deeply about the technicalities of how they’d look like and how they’d act and how they’d treat her, and thinks back to an empty stomach and crowded home and always running away. The drumming pain from her head and mouth come alive all of a sudden and the image of herself walking among the stars disappears. 

She wishes that she had just tried her hand at the blue sparks and pressed deeply into the boy’s skin until God knows what would happen—maybe it would have killed him. She wonders if they’d throw her into jail for murder or fork her over into space. Neither of those two options sounded so bad anymore. 

The first sob lurches from deep inside her, sounding like a scary growl that even she was afraid of. The next ones are ragged and broken hiccups that don’t seem to stop even when she tries. Crying had no use or gain. When she cried when she was hungry, it didn’t make food appear. Neither did it warm her when it was cold. And when she cried when she was being hit, she’d earn five more hits with each sob. She clamps a hand over her mouth.

No one was there. No one could find her, no one could see her, and no one could hit her. So she keeps crying her hot, angry tears, crying until they’re no more. She imagines that she’s cried enough for thirty years’ worth of tears, maybe more than that—it was a good thing. 

Her stomach growls, as if a distraction, and she presses her hands against it, weakly trying to stifle it, fully knowing that bodies do not work like that, but feebly attempting anyway. It doesn’t work. 

She thinks of the people and if they were actually blue, gray, and purple skinned, like the ones she’d seen on vid screens when she’d walk past stores. She thinks of a life where she was blue skinned and up in the stars, not hungry and angry and dirty. Only that she doesn’t like the colour blue and rather the colour green. Maybe she could have been a green alien. She shakes her head at this thought, regarding her bruised brown skin on her skinny arms.

Underneath the bench, underneath the trees, underneath the stars, she thinks of a life wherein she had better clothes and a better place to feel safe other than an abandoned park bench. 

The blood in her mouth is caked and crusting now. Her tooth is probably still on the floor. The boy who had been her latest victim was probably getting yelled at and patched up, told to be grateful and perhaps withheld dinner from. She wants to smile at this thought; _He deserved it,_ she thinks.  


A rush of wind sweeps by and suddenly everything is cold and she just wants to close her eyes.

She doesn’t, though.

The stars seem to run away from her each time she blinks. Stupidly, she pokes three fingers through the slats in the wooden bench, as if reaching for the stars in the sky, an attempt to keep them there with her. As if that, if she reaches far up enough, one would jump into her grasp and pull her up into the sky, away from Earth and its grime and ugliness. 

She wants to yell, _Come back! Take me with you!_

She knows they can’t.

She wishes they could. 

Her stomach growls a third time and she doesn’t want to leave the bench but there’s a garbage can not too far away and the last time she ran, she found a half-eaten sandwich that she’d re-purposed into dinner, picking off the parts that were bitten off and looked ugly. When she limps over to it, there’s nothing but a few cigarette butts and a broken beer bottle that cuts into her fingers as she rummages through the bin. She thinks, maybe, she should be crying again, but her fingers are cold and numb, and even though it stings, she tucks them under her arms and the tears don’t come. 

She ducks under the bench and curls up, ignoring her knees and the bruises and the scrapes and her knocked out tooth. Maybe when the rain clears, she would duck into a store and steal something to eat. Maybe a sweater, too.

She thinks about how angry she is at the stars and the people living there, and how angry she is at the people in their warm homes and stupid families and nice clothes. She thinks about getting hit again, getting socked in the mouth, being put into another home where it all happens again, or being caught on the streets after finally putting some distance only to go right back to square one. She thinks about getting yelled at and wanting to disappear, and never managing to keep her mouth shut long enough not to get smart and get hit again. 

She welcomes the coldness under the bench, under the trees, under the stars.


End file.
